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Published: March 2, 2010
“Pleased with these early results”
Sacramento diocese says Mass attendance up following tv ad blitz
A six-week, $400,000 ‘Catholics Come Home’ television advertising campaign has resulted in an average 2.1 percent increase in weekly Mass attendance in the Diocese of Sacramento, with some parishes reporting double-digit rises in their numbers, the Sacramento Bee reports.
 Sacramento Bishop Jaime Soto unveiled the television ad campaign on Thursday, Dec. 17, 2009 at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. According to the Bee, the ads were aired more than 5,500 times during prime time in both English and Spanish beginning on Dec. 18, 2009 and ending on Jan. 31. The campaign included 19 different spots featuring Catholics who had returned to the Church sharing “their personal stories about going back to the faith,” the Bee said.
"Overall, we're pleased with these early results," Bishop Soto told the newspaper. “I think it underscores what we've said all along, that people want to come back, but feel guilty or worry that they won't be welcome."
Of 100 parishes in the diocese, 51 submitted Mass counts following the ad campaign, said the Bee. “Some parishes showed a marked increase,” the newspaper reported. “St. Joseph Marello Parish in Loomis, for example, had a 27 percent jump, going from 921 attendees to 1,167. Sacred Heart Parish in Anderson had a weekly Mass count of 638 in December and a count of 885 at the end of January, a 39 percent increase.” Other parishes, however, reported decreases in Mass attendance, which diocesan spokesman Kevin Eckery attributed to “bad data.”
"At this point, it looks like the campaign was successful," Eckery told the Bee. "We're going to have to look and see how those numbers develop." The diocesan spokesman also noted that the ads were paid for from private donations – not from the diocese’s budget.
The “Catholics Come Home Campaign” is not unique to the Diocese of Sacramento. Other dioceses across the U.S. have conducted similar campaigns. According to a March 16, 2009 story in the Catholic Sun, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Phoenix, “An estimated 92,000 inactive Catholics have come back to the Church in the last year thanks in large part to the groundbreaking Catholics Come Home television advertising campaign.”
To read the full Sacramento Bee story, Click Here.
To go to the ‘Catholics Come Home’ website, Click Here.
Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2010 3:44 AM By Maryanne Leonard
How absolutely wonderful to read about this great use of private donations to help bring Catholics home to the Church. At Padre Serra Church in Camarillo and elsewhere, a group of returned Catholics offers a wonderful program called Landings, several weeks in length, to help people considering coming home to the Church. Programs like Catholics Come Home and Landings are tremendous gifts to those souls who would like to come home to the Church, and programs like this should be instituted everywhere it is possible to do so.
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Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2010 5:33 AM By RB
Haiti - Catholic - looting
Chili - Catholic - looting
Why have these people not learned the commandments? A disgrace.
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Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2010 9:01 AM By Abeca Christian
RB there are just many Catholics who take their faith for granted and hardly move a finger to learn it and live it. (same thing happens in other religions) It has always been a human thing, take a great example from the old testament, during Moses time, God frees His people from slavery and what do they do? They worship false idols for themselves. We can learn a lot from history and from today, we the people are still pronged to sin, the same types of people, just different times and different faces and names.
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Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2010 9:31 AM By WOODY GUIDRY
WRONG, RB! Instead, try- "SOME loot-OTHERS have to survive by competing." There is NO COMMANDMENT forbidding theft to prevent STARVATION-including CATHOLICS-(they, too, can starve-), but NOT TO PRESERVE one's life is SUICIDE-definitely against the FIFTH Commandment-check it out. While you're at it, check out "RASH JUDGMENT" (Matt. vii,1,2.), also THEFT IN EXTREME NECESSITY,and OCCULT COMPENSATION. How disgraceful is it to compare lack of Charity (Love) with keeping your family alive by taking food and drink that belongs to someone else who does not have the same dire need? Those that steal for other reasons may not even be Catholic. But you and I know many Cathoics who support killing babies. Why have these people not learned the commandments? A disgrace. You and I have the obligation to teach by example!
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Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2010 12:34 PM By Harv
It is too early to tell with these few statistics. One can only come to a conclusion by tracking the headcount for several months at several parishes and seeing what happens. Recall the gospel readings where Christ speaks of seed falling on rocks, shallow ground, good ground, and ground overcome by thistles and weeds. We are the seeds, some of us will bear fruit and some of us won't as Christ described. Its unfortunate, but if the new attendees don't find Christ, they will slowly go back to their old comfortable ways living perhaps without Him.
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Posted Tuesday, March 02, 2010 12:57 PM By JLS
Hey Woody ... great point !!! The people's food supply is disrupted, and it is worse for the poorer people. If the government or the stores do not establish an allocation order, then the blame is theirs, not the starving peoples'.
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Posted Wednesday, March 03, 2010 5:16 PM By Abeca Christian
RB in noticing Woody's comments, in that case I agree with him. When people are starving, I wouldn't consider that looting but if people are running and taking name brand stuff and TV's well, then that is another story. I guess we can't judge unless we live such tragic moments as these poor souls like in Haiti and Chili, we can't judge them when they are trying to survive. But we must still practice good Christian virtue.
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Posted Friday, March 05, 2010 9:26 PM By JLS
Abeca, there is still a fuzzy cloud that protects the looters of TVs. They trade them for food. Or they distribute them to faciliate communications ... they are in a state of panic and want to know the larger governing actions so as to protect themselves. These are some of the poorest and most abject peoples on the planet. Look at some of the photos of them. I cannot imagine many of these people having the remotest capability of doing much work of any kind at all. I once was told by a missionary priest who served for years in the remotest areas of southeast asia, that no matter what that I could never ever become a poor person. He was including if I found myself pushing a shopping cart while in a daze ... That priest could not convey to me the extreme distance between any middle class person in the USA and an actual poor person like we see in Haiti. Yes, it is also a fact that the government has the responsibility to create and maintain order. There are the inevitable clashes ... wars and rumors of wars ... and the poor shall always be with us: I think the influence of the Church of centuries among those peoples has at least shown some mercy and charity, in that the tanks were not called out to steamroll the whole population into submission, as is typical in marxist countries.
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Posted Saturday, March 13, 2010 10:38 AM By Abeca Christian
Yes JLS, but one must still practice virtue but like my grandma once said how can any one practice what they don't know how to? She was right, I guess under those circumstances no one understands until they actually experience what they are experiencing. It's called mercy. We can't judge but we can pray for them, and hopefully if we can't reach them, hopefully someone can show them Jesus so they can grow in what they lacking spiritually. Would be nice to see more saints come out of those moments. Thanks JLS for pointing that to me because one never knows what it would be like to be in those moments, may our Lord's graces never leave us. We need them more now than ever!
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Posted Saturday, March 13, 2010 1:23 PM By JLS
Abeca, sometimes I make a point of going about in public looking downtrodden or poor ... It is extremely aggravating the way I am treated in those situations, and more often by people who normally would cringe if I gave them a menacing look. Yet it is a lesson in humility. I grew up in an era where the heros would take a lot of hits before rising up to the occasion and smiting their oppressors ... uh, but honestly I'm still trying to rise up. Seriously, in that we are in union with God through the Eucharist and that God is also in union with many poor, then we also are in union with many poor; these countless poor have never yet risen up and perhaps won't until the last day. It is Lent for us for a few weeks, yet for them always and generation upon generation until the last day. Our Good Friday comes every week, theirs comes every hour. Our Easter comes every year; theirs comes at the last day. A priest traveled to Africa to give a retreat to the sisters of Bl Teresa of Calcutta. While standing on the platform at the train station waiting for his hostesses, he was surrounded by countless beggers. When the sisters arrived, they explained to his astonishment that none of them were beggars but all of them were thieves. Why, one has to wonder, were they all thieves? What about their brothers who were not thieves? One of the two survived and it was the thief.
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